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A Broadway Flop Again Raises Its Antlers

It is generally not a good sign for a Broadway show when people leave the opening-night party early. That is what Arthur Bicknell noticed at the celebration for the premiere of his play. As soon as the dessert forks were down, there they went, acquaintances, cast members, even family, out the door of Sardi’s restaurant. A friend finally approached with a report on the reviews.

Two words: “the worst.”

Indeed they were. The play was “Moose Murders,” and even now, 25 years later, it is considered the standard of awfulness against which all Broadway flops are judged.

“Was it really that bad?” asked Mr. Bicknell, who now lives in Springfield, Mass., and is the chief publicist for Merriam-Webster. “The simple answer is yes.”

Things weren’t so grim at the L & M bowling lanes in Rochester, N.Y., on Friday night, when a cast of nonprofessional — most barely even amateur — actors had just finished a second performance of “Moose Murders” at the Rochester Contemporary Art Center. The show, a staged reading but with original music, was put together by John Borek, 58, a self-described “part-time conceptual artist” who works by day as an aide to a Rochester city councilman. The first performance was on Feb. 22, the 25th anniversary of the play’s Broadway opening, and closing, night.

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From left, Don Potter, Lisa McMillan and June Gable in Moose Murders (1983). It opened and closed the same night.Credit
Gerry Goodstein

The next scheduled performance is Aug. 9. At Sardi’s. It is all part of Mr. Borek’s idea to pay homage to a play that has transcended its swift demise to become evocative shorthand in the theater world for anything that has gone tremendously wrong.

It is certainly true that Broadway audiences were less than receptive.

“If your name is Arthur Bicknell — or anything like it — change it,” declared Dennis Cunningham, the critic at the CBS affiliate in New York.

Critics described “Moose Murders” as “titanically bad” and “indescribably bad,” a play that “would insult the intelligence of an audience consisting entirely of amoebas” (Brendan Gill, The New Yorker), that looked as it were staged by “a blind director repeatedly kicked in the groin” (John Simon, New York magazine). The columnist Liz Smith had some nice things to say, Mr. Bicknell recalled.

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John Borek, center, introducing Act II of Moose Murders in Rochester. He directed and produced the staged reading.Credit
James Rajotte for The New York Times

Years later, Frank Rich, who was then the theater critic for The New York Times, would call it “the worst play I’ve ever seen on a Broadway stage.” (Mr. Rich’s writings about “Moose Murders” have become such a part of its lore that a recent production of the play in Manila credited Mr. Rich with having written the play.)

The reviews, which were not helped by the man reeking of vomit who sat in the third row during a press preview, made the 14 performances of “Moose Murders” legendary in theater history. Cast members trumpet their involvement in Playbill biographies. The number of people who claim to have seen the show, at the Eugene O’Neill Theater, seems to have multiplied beyond physical possibility, like those who claim to have seen the Beatles at Shea Stadium or Game 5 of the 1956 World Series.

The play, a mystery farce, relates the adventures of Joe Buffalo Dance, Snooks and Howie Keene, Nurse Dagmar, Stinky Holloway and others pulled together on one stormy night at the Wild Moose Lodge, where several murders take place, Stinky tries to sleep with his mother, and a man in a moose costume is assaulted by a bandage-wrapped quadriplegic.

Mr. Bicknell, who was 32 at the time and had written a couple of scripts — including “Masterpieces,” a historical drama about the Brontë family — said he had become aware early that there were problems with the play, and the production.

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Moose Murders at the Rochester Contemporary Art Center.Credit
James Rajotte for The New York Times

The director, John Roach, was also a producer, and his wife was in the show. (Mr. Roach could not be tracked down for this article.) The leading lady, Eve Arden, was supposed to be making a comeback after more than 40 years away from Broadway, but she left after the first preview.

The actress Holland Taylor, eager to pay some bills, stepped in and within a week was performing onstage. Despite calling the production a “misshapen thing at an almost Shakespearean level,” Ms. Taylor now says the experience taught her much about fortitude in the face of disaster.

“There were things that I put my foot down about and changed,” she said in a telephone interview. “But there were things I couldn’t change. Like the play.”

After the show closed immediately, Mr. Bicknell spent a long night drinking with friends and talking about life. Before going to bed the next morning, he walked by the Eugene O’Neill, where the set was already being unloaded.

He tried to move on, writing another play and even a midnight drag show, but eventually gave up and worked for a few years as a literary agent. Someone tried to get permission to turn the play into a musical called “Moose Murders: The Afterbirth,” Mr. Bicknell said, but he was not ready for that.

Eventually he came to terms. “If you can’t redeem, exploit,” he said in a telephone interview. “You have to embrace it.” He’s now writing a book about the experience.

There have been other productions of “Moose Murders,” at community and dinner theaters in Montana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Queens and other far-flung places. (There was a request for permission to mount the play in, appropriately enough, Turkey, Mr. Bicknell said with a laugh.) And now there’s the Rochester produ — uh, art project.

“I want it to be just about the joy of performing,” Mr. Borek said. “I want as little professionalism as possible to come out.” In that regard, it was a success.

The cast included an antiques retailer, a culinary student, a muralist and a Spanish exchange student. They performed with scripts in hand, though some longer scenes were simply narrated. The mysterious moose character was a woman dressed in black holding an inflatable deer head emblazoned with the Miller High Life logo. Sidney Holloway, the mummified quadriplegic, was played by a mannequin, whose head rolled off during the first act. The audience members, most of them anyway, seemed to love it.

None of this answers a fundamental question about “Moose Murders”: With all the terrible shows that have graced the Broadway stage, including notorious clunkers like “Bobbi Boland,” “Dance of the Vampires” and “Carrie,” why did this one become the ne-plus-ultra flop, or, as Mr. Borek called it, the negative superlative? Mr. Bicknell offered theories, but could not say for sure.

“I was thinking about varying degrees of badness,” Mr. Borek said of his project. “There’s bad art that’s kitsch. And there is bad art that’s outrageous. But then there’s some art that’s simply not good.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Broadway Flop Again Raises Its Antlers. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe